Group Wants to Save Sonoma County, Calif. Fire Tower

July 13--On duty more than 2,200 feet above the Sonoma Coast, Lacey Parmeter, 18, measured the weight of ponderosa pine dowels on a scale tucked inside a box atop Pole Mountain.

The calibration, taken on a recent day atop Sonoma County's tallest coastal peak, gauged how much moisture was contained in dead fuel, the dry grasses and accumulated woody debris that feed wildfires.

Parmeter climbed the steps into the two-story fire lookout tower on the bare peak rising between Jenner and Cazadero. On a handheld radio, she called in a batch of weather readings to the Cal Fire station on Mount St. Helena.

"St. Helena, this is Pole Mountain with weather, in service," said Parmeter, a 2012 El Molino High graduate.

The fate of Sonoma County's only remaining fire lookout is in flux, with the potential sale of the private, windswept 238-acre property where it has stood since 1981.

The landowners are ready to sell and have entered a purchase agreement with the nonprofit conservation group Sonoma Land Trust, which must raise $2.35 million by the fall.

The land trust has vowed to allow the fire lookout to continue on the property. But the lookout's future is less certain if the sale does not go through and the property is put on the market.

"Who knows who (the buyer) will be," said Monte Rio Fire Chief Steve Baxman, board member of the nonprofit Pole Mountain Fire Lookout Inc. "It makes no difference to me, as long as they let us keep the lookout."

Residents of Cazadero, Monte Rio and other communities surrounding the west county peak raise more than $40,000 each year to keep Pole Mountain staffed from when the grasses dry out in June until the first rains of October.

Four part-time lookouts share the shifts and are paid about $150 for an eight-hour workday.

The lookout is a remnant of an era when fire watchers stood guard in towers dotting mountain peaks across the United States.

Population growth in the forests and back country has shifted the focus of fire detection from fire watchers to members of the public with cellphones, said Arlen Cravens, acting deputy director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest region.

Yet even as many towers have been shut or turned into vacation rentals, the Forest Service still staffs 58 lookouts in 13 of the forests it manages in California. The Mendocino National Forest still has two lookouts, Anthony Peak and High Glade.

Fire watchers still are an essential link in fire protection strategy when they're "looking into areas where we don't believe we have that high a density of the public and others that can alert us to wildfire," Cravens said.

Pole Mountain is among 97 lookouts in California on the National Historic Lookout Register. And it's the last remaining fire lookout affiliated with Cal Fire in the state, according to Cal Fire Battalion Chief Marshall Turbeville with the Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit.

The state closed lookouts on Mount St. Helena and Mount Jackson in Sonoma County in the early 1990s.

Turbeville is president of the lookout's board, and helps manage operations, including training new lookouts who provide detailed weather reports three times a day.

From Highway 1 north of Jenner, the tower is reached via a private dirt road that winds through the Muniz Ranch subdivision beyond two locked gates.

From Pole Mountain's two-story perch, the view encompasses the rugged Cazadero hills and sweeps as far as Lake County, Mount St. Helena, the Sonoma Valley, Santa Rosa Plain and south to the Point Reyes National Seashore. Some say Mount Diablo can be seen on a clear day.

On July 2, in the midst of a heat wave, Parmeter reported to Cal Fire the air temperature (already 92 degrees at 11 a.m.), as well as relative humidity, wind speed and direction, fuel moisture and other data. She used weights, a wick dipped in water, a tiny fan, thermometers, specially calibrated ponderosa dowels and other tools to make her calculations.

"Yesterday it was really hot," she said.

Parmeter, who grew up on the nearby AP Ranch, said she's called in smoke billowing from a boat at sea and was first to spot smoke from a fire last year near Cache Creek in Yolo County.

"I was born and raised looking at this," said Parmeter, who was training a friend for the job.

Detecting wildfires early can save agencies millions of dollars in firefighting costs. The average large-scale blaze runs about $1 million per day, Turbeville said.

As agencies lost budgets for lookouts, some were turned over to volunteers, including two lookouts in Marin County on Mount Tamalpais and Mount Barnabe in Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

"Fire lookouts have considerable value still," Marin County Fire Chief Jason Weber said. "Someone can watch a smoke column build and develop. For our responding officers, that gives them eyes in the sky."

That information can save money by helping agencies fine tune what ground and air resources they send, Weber and Turbeville said.

"But there are tremendous benefits they provide that you can't put a dollar on," Turbeville said.

The tools they use are simple. A fire finder scope locates direction, and Parmeter uses a map to estimate distance. She learned from her father, Tom, a lookout board member who drives around Cazadero and will call her to spot his truck and test her ability to precisely place his location.

"I like old school; I like that there's almost no new technology here," Lacey Parmeter said.

One day last year, she used the fire scope to place a plume of smoke at a family friend's property.

She called them from a satellite phone and her neighbor told her the smoke was from a barbecue. No fire here, the neighbor said.

Parmeter helped fire paramedics pinpoint the location of a person bit by a rattlesnake on Bay Road. She knew the area well and, for that matter, knew most people who lived there. The snakebite victim, who survived, turned out to be a friend.

"That's when it's hard," Parmeter said.

The survival of Pole Mountain lookout also depends on the community's motivation to keep the tower staffed.

The board sends letters out to surrounding residents each year and holds a benefit breakfast to raise funds.

Support remains strong among some longtimers who remember the devastating 1978 Creighton Ridge fire that ignited when a property owner was mowing a lawn, said Baxman, the Monte Rio fire chief.

The Creighton Ridge fire ravaged more than 12,000 acres and lasted a week, he said, standing below the tower and surveying the brown hills and forested drainages.

"It could happen any time, look at how dry it is," Baxman said.

(You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or julie. [email protected]. On Twitter @jjpressdem.)